Black Mirror Men Against Fire ending explained: What happened in season 3, episode 5?

Black Mirror Men Against Fire ending explained: What happened in season 3, episode 5?

BLACK MIRROR season 3 episode 5 Men Again Fire is quite a difficult watch and one of the most disturbing instalments of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series. But what happened at the end of Men Against Fire?

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All of the soldiers have an implant called MASS which is used to increase their senses and military skills as well as creating an augmented reality to give them an advantage over their enemies.

During one mission Stripe and Hunter find a farmhouse where they suspect a devout Christian man (Francis Magee) is harbouring “roaches”.

They raid the house to find a nest of “roaches”, who appear to be monstrous creatures with sharp teeth who are aggressive.

As he and Hunter are taking down the “roaches”, one appears to fire a strange device at him with an LED on it which he takes from them.

Stripe accidentally shines the light in his eye and get another blast of the LED which affects his MASS implant and causes him to start seeing things differently with his heightened senses now dampened.

Arquette gives Stripe an ultimatum: face imprisonment or erase his memory from the past few days with a full MASS reset.

Stripe’s decision is never shown but the final scene sees him discharged from the military with full honours as he stands in a trance-like state in front of house.

However, in reality, Stripe is standing by himself in front of a ramshackle building covered in graffiti by himself, the implication being that he’s suffering from a sort of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and that his MASS implant is massively malfunctioning.